Arizona legislators have just introduced a bill that would allow churches to claim a property tax exemption on buildings they rent rather than just own. A similar bill was vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer last year, but there’s no telling if the same thing will happen under new Governor Doug Ducey.

House Bill 2128, which passed through the House Ways & Means Committee yesterday on a 6-3 party-line vote, points out that the state already “exempts property owned by a non-profit educational, charitable and religious organization from taxation.”

However, if a church rents space from, say, a public school, they can now claim an exemption on it, too. That rule would not apply to secular non-profit groups that rent the same space.

Mona Eltahawy has an important and eye-opening opinion piece in tomorrow’s international edition of the New York Times (online today) all about the persecution of atheists in Egypt.

The people she writes about — like Karim al-Banna and Alber Saber — are familiar names to readers of this site, as is the ridiculous report about how there are exactly 866 atheists in a country of more than 80 million people: